The Kushan Buddha

Object or Group Name

The Kushan Buddha

Case Summary

In 2007, Manhattan antiquities dealer Nancy Wiener offered a large Kushan-era sculpture of a seated Buddha to the National Gallery of Australia for USD $1,080,000.

Wiener told the NGA she had purchased the sculpture in 2000 from an Englishman named Ian Donaldson, who, she claimed, purchased it while posted in Hong Kong between 1964 and 1966. She provided the museum with a 1985 Certificate of Ownership signed by Donaldson, and an expert report on the Buddha written by Donald Stadtner, an authority in Indian art.

The museum agreed to acquire the Buddha – without attempting to contact Donaldson or Stadtner. In July 2007, Wiener sent an invoice to the NGA along with a guarantee offering to reimburse the museum if questions were ever raised about its provenance. The funds for the purchase were provided in part by Ros Packer, wife of the late media tycoon Kerry Packer and one of Australia’s most prominent philanthropists.

In May 2013 journalist Jason Felch received a tip that the statue's provenance had been falsified. With Australian journalist Michaela Boland, he requested its ownership history from the museum. The NGA refused to provide the records, so Boland filed a formal request under Australia's open records law. An Australian court ordered the documents release in the fall of 2014, and soon after the NGA began its own investigation of the Buddha.

When the NGA contacted Stadtner, whose expert report Wiener had shared 7 years earlier, he told museum officials that the Buddha was authentic but had been illegally exported from India and given the phony ownership history of Ian Donaldson to cover its illicit origins.

Stadtner said Wiener had sold a similar Buddha sculpture to the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore using the same false provenance, Ian Donaldson. Stadtner had learned that the false provenance had been provided to Wiener by the British dealer Douglas Latchford.

Stadtner recalled visiting Latchford in Bangkok: “During the course of a long conversation (and boasting) Latchford said, en passant, that he found Nancy a provenance for the Buddha. I recall that he said that he found ‘an old India hand’ in ‘Hong Kong’."

In September 2016, Australia agreed to return the NGA's Kushan Buddha to India, and, under the terms of the guarantee, Wiener was forced to refund the $1 million purchase price.

In December of that year, Nancy Wiener was arrested in Manhattan. Her criminal indictment cited her role with Latchford in the sale of the two Seated Buddhas as evidence of Wiener’s criminal conduct. Wiener pled guilty and told authorities she had acquired both from Vaman Ghiya, the notorious Indian idol thief and, with Latchford's help, fabricated the Ian Donaldson ownership history.